Why Businesses Need to Invest in Marketing to Grow

A primary goal for any business is to grow. It is to expand in the market, offering various services without compromising the quality. Great marketing helps position your brand in the target market. Your positioning can lead to increased referral sources, as more people know of your services. It can also lead to you being able to charge higher fees, as your brand is seen as a premium service. This is why too that this is the ultimate service for a business to also invest in.

Investing in marketing when business is good helps protect your company against unforeseen changes in the marketplace. Marketing helps customers understand why they should pick you instead of your competitors. What makes you different? Why should customers choose you? How are you different? When is it best to buy your services? these are all key points.

An invaluable service for any business

Marketing and using a marketing agency can pay immediate dividends and can bring long-term value to your company, but you have to support it within your organisation, consistently for it to work at all. Stopping and starting any kind of marketing puts you at a disadvantage and costs you money ramping up new staff or new marketing vendors. It’s easier, faster, and cheaper to make incremental improvements to your marketing programs instead of reinventing and adapting programs to new audiences, new regulations, and new technologies. Every pause costs you time and opens the door for your competitors to take your position in your market.

Marketing is key for the sales pipeline

Marketing generates leads which turn into business for your company. If your company has a 3 or 6-month lead cycle, you have to be on top of your marketing game to keep your company healthy. In some cases, smart marketing investments can help shorten that consumer decision-making cycle and increase your sales numbers but you have to be monitoring changes in your market, evolving customer needs and adapting to those needs to keep your pipeline full.

Starting and stopping marketing creates chaos in your sales system and you can trash any financial forecasting you’ve done. Full stop. If the time comes for you to think about ramping down your marketing, either because you don’t think it’s doing what it’s supposed to or your salespeople are running around with their hair on fire because they’re incredibly busy, don’t. Instead, ask how marketing can help you select better customers, get the edge over your competitors, or set up a paid referral network to filter off the business that’s too small or who’s customers are hard to deal with but don’t stop cold turkey.

Finance your marketing in any way you can

If you are convinced of the benefits in marketing, but you don’t have the cash flow needed to put into a marketing campaign, then it may be worth looking into a business loan. Business funding through Become is a great example of how a business can quickly and easily apply for a loan, go through the process, and then get approval and the money in as little as a few hours. A business loan can provide you with that instant cash you need to then invest in a campaign. Or to help beef up on your current marketing initiatives. It can also help the company to grow.

When done well you can get closer to your clients

Your brand and your company represent so much more than your physical being. There are customers who feel an emotional attachment to your brand and if they don’t, you want them to. Brand positioning is the spot in the mind of our consumers that we want to own. So when they come into contact with your brand, we want them to think certain thoughts or feel a certain way. It’s a subconscious effect, but ever-so important. If your customers (or your tribe) can connect with your offering on an emotional level, you have a lot more chance of them recalling your brand, talking about your brand to others and best of all, becoming loyal to your brand.

Good marketing will make you bullet proof in a time or times of a down turn

Every business has them. Peaks and troughs can cause chaos with resource planning, cash flow etc. We would be naive to think that we can completely change people’s behaviour enough to work around our business. Or to purchase our product whenever we need them to. All without giving them good reason to! If you know a certain period of the year is quiet, you can create marketing campaigns to help influence sales around those times, or introduce sales / products that might be more suitable to the customer then. Alternatively, you can use your marketing to further amplify sales in peak periods to cover you over the trough periods.

You can also be sure to save some money in the long run too

Running expensive advertising campaigns on channels that your target audience don’t tune into or that don’t do a good job of communicating your messaging or call to actions can be a very, very expensive exercise! We have saved small businesses thousands of dollars over the ten years that we have been operating simply by directing their advertising to targeted channels and tightening up their Ad creative.

Why is growth in business important?

Growth can be good for business for many different reasons. For example, it may allow you to:

• take advantage of new opportunities
• expand your products or services
• attract more customers
• increase sales
• employ more staff

It may also help you to respond to market demand, increase your market share and capitalise on your growing brand. It often spurs innovation, helping you to differentiate in the market and stave off competition.

Growth can also boost your business’ credibility, allow you to broaden your supply base and increase stability and profits. However, to be successful and sustainable, growth has to be strategic and has to happen for the right reasons.

Reasons for business growth

Most businesses grow to become bigger, perhaps through increasing sales or market share, but size isn’t the only driver. Many other benefits motivate businesses to grow. For example:

• greater sustainability or resilience in the market
• lower costs – due to economies of scale
• greater market dominance
• greater buying and bargaining power
• ability to mitigate commercial risks – eg through diversification
• ability to reduce the threat of competition
• ability to survive market fluctuations and downturns
• ability to attract the best talent and staff

Never rule out word of mouth as a means of marketing

Yes, there is no better publicity than “word of mouth”. To have a close friend recommend a product to you is the best publicity any company can get. Because in the end, one trusts more his friends (who don’t want to sell anything to you, but only want you to solve your problem) than a company.

All of this is true, so much so that we must make sure that our customers are truly satisfied, otherwise we’d be creating unwanted negative publicity. But, if you want to grow big, frame this good “word of mouth” publicity that you already have within an even bigger campaign, so that the reach is greater. If more people know you, and more people are satisfied with your product, this “word of mouth” recommendation will also be much higher. The idea of ​​investing in marketing is to make your company’s sales increase even more than they would with your friends and family recommendations only.

Overall

Properly measuring your marketing, implementation of a CRM system, and learning/understanding marketing strategy can all pay you back over time. So, there are five ways that marketing pays you back, and generates revenue in your business. If you evaluate every marketing activity purely based on what it generates (direct) in sales while it is running, then you are massively underestimating and undervaluing the importance of marketing in your business.